In an admission that has the New York state Supreme Court in an uproar, a retired Brooklyn judge said he paid $35,000 to a Democratic leader more than three decades ago to get a seat on the bench, New York Newsday reports.
The payment, says Thomas R. Jones, 89, was “in accordance with the customs and practices of the day,” though he added, “It was not right then, and it’s not right now.”
The paper said Jones, who served on the state Supreme Court from 1969 to 1985, scraped together enough money to make the payment allegedly demanded by now-deceased Brooklyn district leader Thomas Fortune. Jones said he borrowed the money from relatives, close friends and from a bank.
When he had enough, Jones said he put the money in a bag and left his home in Brooklyn to see Fortune at his dry-cleaning business. He told Newsday he and Fortune counted out the money there at the shop.
Jones, in his interview, said he was still troubled by the manner in which he became a jurist. But he said from the time he took the bench, he dispensed justice fairly and without regard to politics.
Jones’ account of how he managed to secure his job was especially troublesome because it occurred in a borough fraught with charges of judicial corruption, the paper said. He said even now, he believes there are judges sitting on the bench who bought their job.
The aging ex-judge said in the mid-1960s, when he began expressing an interest in a Supreme Court judgeship, he was told he’d have to pay $50,000 to Fortune, who was then a leader in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section.
He had already spent two years in the New York state Assembly and two years as a Civil Court judge, positions he said he obtained without paying for them.
Still, he said, he was taken aback by the tactless request for money. But, he claimed during his tenure on the bench he kept his distance from others seeking political favors.
Fortune was an assemblyman from 1969 to 1982 and was always prominent in Brooklyn politics. In the heavily Democratic borough, party candidates are usually a shoo-in.
Court officials were surprised by Jones’ story.
“It’s amazing!” one court clerk was overheard telling a judge as they met in the plaza outside the courthouse, the paper said.
Others, however, were not impressed.
“I am not shocked at all,” Manhattan personal-injury attorney Tom Laquercia told Newsday.
Laquercia, in practice since 1970, said when he was young he had heard that judgeships cost upwards of $35,000 and that a Supreme Court seat cost $50,000. He also said stories circulated that there were well-known “bagmen” – private lawyers who would serve as go-betweens for the corrupt jurists and attorneys who purchased favors from them. Jones also discussed bagmen in his interview.
“The general feeling is it is all true, it has always been known and it is not news,” said another attorney who did not want to be named. “The basic feeling is it has been part of the system for a long time. … I don’t know what to do about it.”
Others said they had doubts about Jones’ story.
Andrew Fisher, member of a powerful Democratic Brooklyn family, said he had respect for Jones but wasn’t ready to believe him.
